


Trust Fall

by Corby (corbyinoz), corbyinoz



Series: The Bittersweet Symphony [2]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Angst and Humor, Brothers, Gen, Post-Legacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-08-13 08:15:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7969249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corbyinoz/pseuds/Corby, https://archiveofourown.org/users/corbyinoz/pseuds/corbyinoz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alan Tracy should have every reason to be the happiest 17 year old on the planet. Right? And that's why it's just so hard when he is very definitely... not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to Solleil Lumiere for her beta work (a while back, this one!) and general TAG goodness.
> 
> Some swearing in here.

Trust Fall

Alan Tracy was bored as only a privileged seventeen year old living on a south sea island with frequent access to rocket ships could be.

At least, Alan labelled it as boredom. Far safer to claim that than anything more ambiguous.

Homework was done, so far as he could take it. The question of how to use Bernoulli’s equation to find the kinetic energy of fluid if the fluid is not incompressible and inviscid was beyond him, and there was no one at hand to help him. The essential unfairness of this, given that one brother was a genius (John), whose brilliance paled when compared with his friend (Brains - genius to the max), and that his other brothers (Virgil, Scott and Gordon) were no slouches in the physics department either, and yet not one of them was immediately available to him – well, it just added to the overall shittiness of the day. He put his homework aside with a sense of dissatisfaction that collided with a well-established feeling of nothing to do and no one to do it with overlaying that darker feeling he refused to look at to leave him completely lacking in motivation for life, in general.

The reasons for the distinct lack of familial support were various. Up in Thunderbird 5 John, he knew, was on a scheduled down time. They’d come off a week of rescues, and it was just a matter of mental survival for John to take a regulated break from being the first responder. Things were patched through to the island base and John was, hopefully, sleeping. Not even Alan’s well-burnished sense of grievance could justify sending a request upwards to disturb that.

Brains would have been an excellent choice, but he was currently in London, after being dropped there by Kayo on her way to Osaka. She was investigating the design and purchase of new uniforms for International Rescue. Their old ones were configured in such a way that they contained an anti-bacterial, anti-viral solution in the outer layer, something that exuded a microscopic but highly effective amount of protection to keep the Tracy boys as healthy as possible as they travelled from one time zone and one area of seasonal disorders to another. Scott was in the infirmary and Scott’s illness should not, according to Brains’ indignant cries, have happened. He was probably already ticked off that he misdiagnosed it in the first place; by evil chance, Scott had picked up a bad rash from a contaminant at the last rescue site, and this had sent Brains in completely the wrong direction when Scott arrived home with a raging fever and lozenge sized blisters on his hands and face.

The contaminant was nothing Brains had seen before, and if you wanted to get their resident genius in a snit, just hurt one of his boys with an unknown agent and watch him lather up. The level of muttering and banging and hair tearing-outing would have been hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that Scott was in real pain – and Brains not knowing something was more than a little bit scary. Through contacts in the medical research field, Brains had discovered someone who might have a lead on what constituted the new Agent 85, as it was being called in ‘certain clandestine circles of my erstwhile h’acquaintance’, as Parker put it.

That fever and those blisters were the reason Scott was crossed off Alan’s Helpful for Homework list. Moodily, Alan wandered downstairs to the infirmary and dared to poke his head around the door to see if Scott was any better. Less than a minute later he scuttled down the passageway, sadder and wiser. Scott was not receiving visitors today, clearly. Alan might have guessed; all his brothers hated being incapacitated, but Scott probably loathed it most vehemently. And there was the whole ‘new and feral contaminant’ aspect that Scott would have firmly forefronted in his mind.

“It’s called quarantine for a reason, Alan!”

Yeah, always nice to have a Scott level bellow follow you down the hall. Especially when it came out as more of a constipated wheeze.

It all just sucked.

He could hear Grandma watching the TV. Grandma was great for many things, but physics was not one of them. History and geography she had a lock on; as a back-up for Virgil in art and music, she was invaluable. But the hard (and domestic) sciences were just not her thing. And as she was addicted to the Japanese detective series Hiramu, and as the latest episode was coming through about now, Alan knew he’d get a distracted hearing at best.

Alan wandered outside as a course of last resort, looking for the last two options available to him. He could see Virgil sitting on a sun lounger on the far side of the pool, and Gordon alongside him, working on something at a table under an umbrella. He kicked at discarded boogie board as he headed towards them, on the basis that if he wasn’t enjoying himself he didn’t see why a boogie board should sit there in the sun, so smug.

“Whatya up to?”

What the greeting lacked in originality it made up for in deliberate annoyingness. Gordon glanced up briefly from where he was wielding a screwdriver with evil, almost flamboyant intent on a tiny component, and gave him a welcoming grin; Virgil didn’t look up from the drawing pad rested on his knees, in which he was busily engaged with a pencil. He did give Alan a grunt, which was something.

“Hey Al. Pull up a pool, take a swim.”

“Nah.” Alan deposited himself full length on the other sun lounger, limbs splayed as if suddenly struck down by a higher force. “Too hot.”

“You know that makes exactly zero sense?” Gordon flipped the component in his hand and began driving the screwdriver energetically in its depths as if hounding out some tiny refugee from justice.

“I’m booo-ooored.”

“And you thought you’d share the love?”

“No one else will talk to me.”

“So you’ve completely lost your gruntle.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Gordon tapped the component violently against the edge of the table. “How’s Scott?”

“I stuck my head around the door and he made a sound at me that made me think of a hoot owl in a blender.”

Gordon winced. “That good, huh?”

“Pneumonia sucks.”

“That it does.”

“Hey, Virgil. Whatcha drawing?”

“Naked women,” Virgil muttered.

“Really?”

Gordon looked up under his eyebrows and gave a conspiratorial smirk to Virgil, who sighed.

“No. Not really.” He gave a small shrug. “Struggling to get through the static to find my muse just now.” 

“So what are you doing instead of musing?” Alan asked the question without an ounce of curiosity, even as he lolled his head towards his brother as if to demonstrate that he was deeply invested in the answer.

Instead it was Gordon who gave a kind of giggle.

“He’s drawing us as animals.” Tongue out, he gave a wrench on the screwdriver, and half of the component suddenly popped into the air to land on the table and then roll noisily off the edge to smash against the tiles. Gordon followed its progress with surprise, and then stared sadly at the remains by his feet. “Well, shit.”

“Too many muscles,” Virgil said vaguely, shading something with focused industry on the drawing pad.

“You’re making us animals? What am I? Do me, do me!”

“Haven’t done you yet.” Virgil finished the shading and held the page at arm’s length to get a better view of it. Alan grumped, crossing his arms.

“Figures. Bet you’ve done Scott.”

“I started with me.” Virgil drew the picture close again and recommenced drawing. “That was the point. It’s an imagination exercise, in order to access the subconscious.”

“Right now my subconscious is telling me this component is screwed,” Gordon sighed.

“Well, it is now you’ve done that to it,” said Alan, looking at the dead part on the ground. He rolled over fully and draped one arm over the sun-lounger’s arm. “So what kind of animal are you, Virgil?”

“Did you have to meditate to figure out your spirit animal?” Gordon said, bending to pick up the pieces and glare at each one individually.

“You just relax, and let something come to you.” Reluctantly, Virgil flipped the drawing pad back several pages and turned it to face his brothers. “That was me.”

A very life-like black bear was on the page, on its hind legs, claws extended to tear into the bark of the nearby tree. Its head was turned towards the viewer, calm and strong as it looked out at the world.

“Huh.” Alan flumped back down after making the effort to raise himself up to see it. “Shoulda put a flannel shirt on it. But it does kinda look like you. You gave it your eyes.”

“You know, I can see it?” Gordon bent back to his work. “Virgil the old bear, snuffling along, digging out bits and pieces, finding what’s under the surface. Attracted to food.”

“Deadly when aroused,” Virgil said.

“Please.” Gordon looked pained. “Don’t use that word about yourself in my hearing.”

“Virgil the grumpy old bear. Okay. I’ll allow it.” Alan rolled back so that he could rest both hands on his chest, judiciously. “Who else you got?”

“Well – I tried to do Scott.” Virgil flipped the page over to the next one. “But I don’t know – it just didn’t work.”

On the page a wolf looked outwards, its eyes a startling blue, its ears alert, one paw raised as if to launch itself at some threat only it could see. There was something very Scott-like in its expression.

“A wolf? How come?”

Virgil scratched his head. “I guess I thought, you know. Leader of the pack. Smart, brave. Ferocious when it needs to be. It should be fine, but it just doesn’t work, because Scott – “

“Is such a dork,” Gordon finished in perfect harmony with him. 

“Or given how he sounds this morning, a honey badger,” added Virgil.

“I think he could be a wolf,” Alan defended stoutly. “Or at least a German shepherd.”

“Have you met Scott?” Gordon feigned outrage. “A wolf is way too cool for him. A yappy dog, mayyybe.” 

“Huh. I bet it’s better than your one. You’re jealous.”

Gordon grinned at him.

“Nah, I liked mine.”

“You’ve done Gordon?”

“Phrasing,” murmured Virgil.

“Show me!” Alan stretched his hand out, but Virgil kept the pad clear of his grabbing fingers.

“Here.” He revealed the page, and after a single look Alan laughed.

“That’s him alright,” he chuckled.

An otter, its head tilted inquiringly, seemed to grin as its sinuous body stood above a captured fish. Gordon’s amber eyes peered past sleek fur, above whiskers that bristled with impudence. The small, strong shoulders gave the lie to any cuteness; the claws that held down the fish were long and strategically placed.

“Yeah. Rudimentary sense of tool use, plays before it works and the pelt looks great as a hat.”

“Can train them to fish, but you gotta keep a leash on them,” added Alan.

Gordon held up the component and blew into it before peering closely at its interior again. “They’re loyal to their family, and fierce when something they don’t like –“ he kicked out at Alan’s lounger – “comes into their territory. Plus, you know. Boy, you should see them in the water.”

The sun had shifted enough that Alan’s foot was now in it, and he pulled it back with a disgruntled sigh.

“So me and John miss out. Figures.”

Gordon grinned again, as Virgil ducked his head.

“Uh, no, I’ve finished John’s. I liked that one.”

“Typical.” Alan’s gloom was like a Pacific thunderstorm, boiling up on a low horizon. “So go on. I may as well see it.”

Without a word, Virgil revealed the last finished page. In the centre, suspended in the depths of the ocean, was a giant blue whale.

“That’s John is it?”

Virgil shrugged. “It’s what came to me.”

“It’s a blubber thing. John’s putting on weight,” offered Gordon, helpfully. 

“You just don’t get it,” said Alan. “Sometimes you can be such a child.”

“Oh, do pray tell, O Oracle of all things arty. Please share the inner meanings of balaenoptera musculus.”

“Okay.” Alan’s mouth screwed up as his brow furrowed. 

“Damn, I can hear the clanking from here,” Gordon said.

“Let him be.” Virgil began drawing again. 

“So,” Alan began, portentously, “I think the blue whale symbolises John swimming through space. He’s alone, but not lonely. He’s connected. The blue whale is singing to all the other blue whales, so he’s a transmitter of messages. And he goes deep, he knows all the secrets of the ocean because that’s where he spends his time, in the deep stuff, thinking his deep thoughts. There. How’d I do?”

He looked over to see Gordon and Virgil staring at him. At last, Gordon shook his head.

“Just so hopelessly weird.”

But Virgil gave a huff of laughter. “And once again you surprise me, little brother,” he finally said.

“That’s me.” Alan wasn’t in any mood to find comfort in compliments. If it was one, which is something you could never be too sure of where Virgil was concerned. “Source of amusement for family and friends.”

“Wow.” Gordon put down the component with an air of finality. “Okay. What’s up with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you know what Scott would say if he had working lungs and the ability to remain vertical for longer than ten seconds.”

“Yeah. I know.” Alan waved towards the hangars hidden beneath rock and villa and swimming pool. “Always plenty of work to be done.” Even he could hear the whine in his voice. “I know there is, and I know I should just be happy to be – here,” and he swept his arm as if to reveal the brilliance of the sky, the lushness of the trees and ferns. “I know I’m sounding like the worst spoiled brat.”

And that was the great thing about Gordon. For as much as he gave him grief, a tax payable by Alan’s poor judgement in not being born before him, he somehow always knew when his little brother really needed him.

“Hey.” He leaned over and slapped Alan’s foot. “How about we go to the inlet? You know, I think the new anemones I put in will be doing great. I’ve got a scuba mask with your name on it.”

Alan groaned, but the attention made him feel a bit better. “Carry me,” he said, raising his arms feebly.

Gordon laughed.

“In your dreams. Your wildest drug-fuelled dreams.”

“Ugh. You suck.” But Alan somehow managed to drag himself upright, because the fact of his older brother standing there waiting for him gave him just enough energy to lever himself up from the lounger.

“Come on, Al.” Gordon clapped him on the back in congratulations for getting upright. “Beers on the way.”

“Said no one ever on this place,” Alan grumbled. “You know we can’t.”

“Especially not with Scott out of action,” said Virgil, putting aside the drawing pad and laying back with every apparent intention of just snoozing for the foreseeable future. “Not to mention the fact you are still under age.”

“Okay, okay. Ginger beer? Root beer? Non-alcoholic beer- you know, no, wash my mouth out, such a thing should not exist.” Gordon reached back and grabbed Alan’s jeans belt. “Come on. We’ll stay pure in mind and body. Let Virgil the bear hibernate.”

Groaning theatrically, Alan followed. Just being with Gordon pushed away some of the unhappiness that was pervading his body like a kind of virus, but he knew the respite was temporary. If he was truly honest with himself, he knew that something else was burning in his belly, deep below these surface irritations, but it wasn’t anything he wanted to explore. He only had a dim notion of it, and it scared him. There was a sense at the back of his mind that told him whatever it was that was drifting like smoke up through his emotional self was something that could fundamentally affect who and how he was. Better by far to sulk like a child than to face his fears like a man. There had to be some advantage to being the youngest, surely?

He caught up with his brother and ambled beside him to the storage locker kept beneath the main villa, intent on not expending too much energy in the enervating heat of a south Pacific summer morning.

“Here,” Gordon said, handing him a mask and a snorkel. “My rock pool is looking brilliant. All the anemones are thriving since I brought in the neopetolisthes and some alpheus.”

Alan smacked his arm. “In English, doofus.”

Rolling his eyes, Gordon said,”Crabs and shrimps.”

“See? That wasn’t so hard.”

“Okay, remember that next time you start yammering on about the latest rocket gadget on that red beast of yours.”

Gordon’s ongoing interest in marine biology had been nurtured and maintained with his access to the abundance of life surrounding their island. Sometimes Alan envied him an interest that could be pursued without leaving the island, or spending a cent. All his own passions required engines and expense. And race-tracks, which were significantly noticeable by their absence on a rocky island. Just thinking about it as Gordon gathered their gear and headed off with unfeigned enthusiasm brought back his easily worn petulance.

“It’s not fair. I can’t get to do what I want, but you get to play with your crabs and shrimps. I mean, why someone would want to play with them instead of eat them…”

Gordon led the way down the path and towards the rear of the island, but his voice was clear as he called back. “You eat my shrimp, you end up with sea lice in your shorts.”

“Ew. Really? You’d really do that? You suck.”

Gordon’s laugh was the only answer, so Alan hurried after him, muttering. 

“I bet you name them all. Jerry and Dave the crabs. Herbie and Colin the shrimps.”

“Colin? Who names a shrimp Colin?”

“You have freakish hearing, you know that?”

“Colin. For a shrimp.” Gordon was shaking his head as they approached his prized rock pool. “That is clearly such an dugong name.”

The rock pool was almost six metres across, a naturally enclosed circle of rock that still bore the traces of its beginning as a volcanic lava flow in the conglomerate that lay on the sand around it and the hardened, sharp edges of basalt bubbles that formed it. Gordon reached the edge and crouched there happily, taking time to observe whatever was going on below the surface before entering into it. On this approach the side of the pool was covered by shade from the ylang ylang trees and ferns that grew almost to its edge.

“Al! Look!” Gordon pointed excitedly. “Wow, so many babies! Can you see them?”

Alan leant over to peer moodily into the pool’s clear depths, lined with green and rusty red. He could see anemones on the sides of the pool waving in the gentle ebb and flow of the sea waves that occasionally broke against the rocks and washed their leavings into the water. Further down he could see where a second current, independent of the first, swirled the larger seaweeds in a slow motion flamenco. Scattered between them all were a hundred tiny slivers of silver and red that shifted as one as the school of baby fish zigzagged about the fronds.

It was undeniably beautiful, and when Gordon lifted his face to look up at Alan’s, he must have seen his brother’s expression because he grinned even wider.

“Damn right, it’s awesome,” he said, in answer to Alan’s unspoken approval.

Alan sat down and pulled off his sneakers.

“Wonder if they think my feet are gods from above. The five headed god of Alan,” he said, sliding first one foot and then the other into the water. The coolness was almost abrasive after the heat of the walk.

“Huh. You know, I’ve never had a messianic moment when I got in the pool. You are a Very Special Boy,” Gordon said, his voice dripping with insincere admiration.

“Piss off,” Alan grinned. “Look.” He wriggled his toes. “They think the sky god is speaking to them.”

“Flee! The sky is full of evil!”

The fish ignored them both, darting and turning en masse above the coral. Alan leaned back on his elbows, shifting until he found a relatively smooth place for his arms to rest, avoiding the sharper outcrops. He turned his head lazily to insult his brother again, in thanks for the beauty and peace of this place, and something incongruous caught his attention, a darker spot upon the soil. He reached over, balanced on one elbow, and lifted an overhanging broad leaf. 

Stark and immediately foreign was the broad imprint of a boot.

And there it was, in the shape of that imprint. Everything bleak and dark and scary that was lingering deep in his belly suddenly made itself known.

“Look, Gordon.” He held the fern frond aside so that his brother, turning back, could get a better look at it, and was astonished his own voice didn’t shake. “That doesn’t belong to any of us.”

“How do you know?” Gordon peered backwards. He wasn’t disagreeing with him, but he wanted the argument laid out.

Alan pointed to the raised heel with its half-diamond pattern. “No one on this island has a boot with that sole on it.”

“You know this?”

“Yeah.” Alan dropped the fern and angrily swiped over the imprint, as if that simple act would render the significance of that boot print null and void. “I went around and studied all of our boots about a year ago. I figured I’d know if anyone else ever set foot on the place.”

Gordon gave a sympathetic grimace. “Alan Tracy, boy detective to the rescue?”

“Something like that. I’d be out walking, and I’d see the footprint, and I’d know it wasn’t anyone on the island and so I’d raise the alarm and we’d catch the intruder.” He shrugged, trying to downplay the ugliness that was catching in his throat. “Just a stupid kid’s daydream. When it really happened, I was stuck out in space.”

“Hey. We were all stuck. None of us covered ourselves in glory that day. Except Kayo, of course. Kayo handed that asshole’s asshole to him on a plate with a double banger firecracker up it just for free. All we got to do was bat our eyelashes and thank our hero for saving us.” Alan was aware that Gordon was carefully not looking at him. “That why you’ve been out of sorts?”

In one way, it was comforting to know that Gordon, at least, had noticed that he was unhappy. On another, it was getting dangerously close to that big unspoken worry that roiled in his gut. Pushback was needed.

“Out of sorts? You sound like Grandma.”

“Okay. A miserable little pain in the ass, then?”

Alan shrugged again, and deliberately kicked his feet to disrupt the gentle swell of the rock-pool’s surface.

“Okay, so I’m miserable. Don’t I have the right to be?” Great. Without even the slightest hint of resistance, that looming sense of unease, of wrongness, was finding voice. “I hate thinking of that – that creep here. Him, all his stupid henchmen and their stupid ideas about taking us all down.”

“Al. Listen.” Gordon put his hand on Alan’s shoulder, then pulled it off self-consciously. “I get it. The Hood is an asshole, and for a bit there he got to be an asshole on our island.”

“In our home,” Alan said, his voice leaving no doubt as to how much worse that was.

“Yeah.”

“I mean, anywhere I look, I think, was he here? Did he touch that? And knowing I did nothing, absolutely nothing to get him off this place… how can you deal with it? Doesn’t it just butter your muffin, knowing he was standing in our home, pushing around our family, standing where Dad – where Dad used to - “ He stopped. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so young and so inadequate. It didn’t seem as though anyone else had taken anything but a moment to shake off the lingering sense of disquiet that The Hood’s incursion had aroused. And here he was, a month later, still stewing over it. He gave a quick side glance at Gordon, to see if he was mocking him; but Gordon’s face was down, looking at the water, only a slight frown showing he was listening.

“So yeah. I’m ‘out of sorts’. I can’t settle. Can’t stop thinking about it. How easy it was for him. How hopeless we were.”

“Were we?” Gordon still didn’t look at him, instead picking at a piece of loose coral caught in the rocks and dropping it carefully into the water.

“You want me to rewind the blow by blow? I was trapped in space, just sitting there, Gords, couldn’t do a damn thing. Scotty and Virgil had their ships stolen from them. You – “

“Yeah, I was stuck too far down to get back to the surface in any kind of a hurry. That was a real moment.” 

Alan threw up his hands. “And that doesn’t bother you?”

“Nope.” Gordon dug out another piece of coral, flipped it further out into the rock pool. “I think you’re looking at it wrong, Allie.” 

“Well of course I am!” Alan dragged an agitated hand through his hair. “Everyone else is fine with it. Don’t you get it? That’s the worst thing about all this. I’m obviously too much of a kid. I keep feeling like it was the day Mom left us alone in the storm, and I just knew we were both gonna get swept away, and then after I just couldn’t feel safe, not for the longest time, and nobody else even noticed. It’s just like that. All the rest of you just think it’s another day at the office.”

“Whoa. No.” That made Gordon look around. “Hell no. Wait, okay, firstly? Mom didn’t leave us alone, I got no idea where that came from, and second? That day when that douchenozzle took the island was one of the truly sucky days of my life and I have had a few. Including the day I let Grandma’s chickens out and forgot to put them back and they got over the fence and started the Coniston County Chicken War.”

Alan couldn’t help it. As preoccupied by his unhappiness as he was, he had to gasp at that revelation.

“That was you?”

Gordon held up a warning finger. “That information stays here. I have not told a soul, so if she hears I’ll know it was you.”

“Dayum.” Alan was beyond impressed. “The Chicken Wars got Mrs Chaverton out of her house for the first time in thirty years.”

“I know.”

“Jaynie Cullen lost her prize vegetable patch.”

“I know, Al.”

“They arrested Mackie Kenundra over that one.”

“I KNOW, Al. Jeez.”

“So – worse than that?”

Gordon had to chuckle. 

“Yeah, I think the Hood won on a countback. Mind you, it was hard to tell – he’s got a head like an egg, and his minions were running round like headless chickens, by the time Kayo got done with them.”

“But what about next time?” The fear that lay at the heart of it all was finally out, and Alan felt his face heat up. “What if we don’t get so lucky next time?”

“Lucky? Had nothing to do with luck, Al. Dude, you’re looking at it wrong. Here; if Grainey Morris has a bad day on the mound, the other team gets up four zip but Alvaro Sanchez comes in and pitches for him and wins the game – does that make the team bad? Because it was losing for a while?”

“We were beyond losers, Gordon, we were getting our butts whipped.”

“Individually, yes. But the team didn’t. Did it?” Gordon waved his arm around, indicating the gentle sea, the green lushness, the blazing blue sky. “Who won? Which team came out on top? And it had nothing to do with luck, it had everything to do with good people being on the team, lots of good planning, lots of brains and smarts. We weren’t prepared to get trapped the way we were, but we were prepared for the end-run onto the island, and Kayo played her part like the champion she is. How many times in a rescue has it looked like things are going wrong, and how many times do we pull it back? It’s not luck, Al. It’s being the right people for the job, with the right training, right equipment, right purpose.” Gordon stopped, obviously a little surprised at his own vehemence. “Yeah, well. The Hood’s got nothing on us, Al. We have got a hell of a team.”

It felt better. It really did. The overwhelming sense of inadequacy, and loneliness in feeling that way, subsided, just a little. Gordon was right; somehow, Alan had become focused on what he did that day and how little he had contributed to the successful outcome. But after all, Gordon hadn’t done much better, and nor had Scott or Virgil. 

“Yeah, I know that we’re a team.”

“Sure. But there’s knowing something and there’s trusting something.” Gordon gave a funny little dip of his head, as if a memory had just bitten behind his ear. “At WASP, I remember doing trust exercises with buddies of mine, and there was always that moment at the top of the drop – you say you trust ‘em, but when it comes to your life, do you really? And then we all kinda went, hell yeah, and dived. That’s what a team does, and you gotta trust they’ve got your back.”

“As long as one member of the team gets it, we’re okay?”

“There you go.” Gordon nudged at Alan’s shoulder, deliberately too rough. “This mean you’re going to stop sulking about like a drama major in a dating slump?”

“What do you know about drama majors?”

“Hey! I did two semesters of drama. Had a blast, too.” The smile on Gordon’s face was one of reminiscence. “I mean, mostly it was just to watch Dad’s face when I told him. That alone was worth the price of the greasepaint. So? How ‘bout it?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Alan couldn’t help the grin that was growing on his face. “I’ll think about it.”

“There’s my brave little trouper.”

“Fuck off.”

They sat in silence for a while, the water glistening and cool on their feet, shade shifting through the leaves of the foliage above them. At last, Alan sighed.

“Guess I better get back. I really do need to finish that homework. Don’t suppose you know anything about some dude called Bernoulli?”

“Bernoulli? Man, I am all about Bernoulli. Compression of fluids? That’s so my gig. He’s definitely in my rock band.” Gordon grinned at him as if that kind of statement would ever make sense. But he’d been nice to him, so Alan only used a third of his sarcasm death ray in his look.

“Your what?”

“My rock band. I got Bernoulli, I got Jacques Cousteau on lead guitar, I got Edie Widder and Elke Jonsdottir on vocals, Henry Stommel on drums and I’m rhythm guitar, natch.”

“Your rock band.”

“What – you telling me you don’t have an all-star line-up in your head?”

“Well,” Alan mumbled, “not a band.”

“Ohhh, I see.” Gordon flicked water at him, making the tiny creatures below the surface scatter into the rock crevices. “So what do you have?”

“My space crew?”

“Mmm-mm. Space Crew. On your spacey intergalactic space voyage of space discovery. In space. Makes sense. So you got…” His big brother rolled his hand in invitation. A small, reluctant smile began to quirk Alan’s mouth.

“Gagarin. ‘Cos, you know, the first. Chuck Yeager.”

“Bringing the awesome,” said Gordon solemnly. Alan nodded.

“Definitely bringing the awesome. Alan Shephard.”

“Must have,” Gordon agreed. Above him in a ylang-ylang tree a blue-crowned lorikeet gave a shriek that made both men look up and laugh.

“Another Shep fan,” said Gordon. Alan gave a thumbs up into the dense foliage that overhung the rock pool and Gordon nudged him with his shoulder. “So – next?”

“Xiue Lin-Chin. That EVA, when she single-handedly rescued that space station crew by re-rigging the escape pod and scooting back into the radiation blowout on Orbiter 5? Wow.”

“And, way John tells it, she then went on to design the safety valve on the new Orbiters that meant the leak could never happen again. See?” Gordon grinned. “I pay attention to your boring spacey stuff. Who else?”

Alan went to open his mouth, and his mood, steadily improving, took a dive again.

“Well… Dad.”

Gordon, bless him, didn’t let the ball drop.

“Well, yeah. ‘Course, Dad. Best of the best, right there. Anyone else?”

“Maybe Paulina Gregorieva? I mean, she’s amazing, but she’s kinda scary too.”

“And Chuck Yeager isn’t?” Gordon shook his head. “I think if I ever met Chuck, I’d break out in hives and then pee my pants.”

Alan snorted. “Before giggling hysterically and running away.”

“Oh yeah. Hysterics coming up in five. That man invented badass. He makes my best badass exploring look like a cub scout camping in the scout hall.”

“Do you even have a ‘best badass’?”

John’s voice coming from a hidden speaker above them and to the right startled them both so much that Alan nearly fell into the pool.

“Alan and Gordon, get yourselves back to control. We have a situation.”

“Ah, no,” he heard Gordon mutter under his breath. He glanced over, and saw the worried expression there before it was lost to a tight grin and a sigh of exaggerated annoyance.

“Guess Thunderbird One will be getting a day out after all,” Gordon said, his tone light. “Hey, how many other kids get to avoid homework because they’re flying a jet at 22k an hour?”

“Yeah. So lucky, me.” 

“Well, you are. I mean, you have to put up with lame-ass Scott, and Virgil’s insane, certifiable, and John is weird. Off the planet weird, literally. But you do have one outstanding brother. And Grandma.”

“And Max.”

“And Brains and Kayo.” Gordon leaned down and helped himself up by pushing off Alan’s shoulder, sending Alan sprawling back down to the ground. “Hell of a team we got there.”

 


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, I am finishing this one. This is the third installment of The Bittersweet Symphony series, following Gordon (An Aquanaut Walks into a Bar) and Scott (Yellow Sky). Alan's trust issues here, post-Legacy and as a small boy.  
> Each of these stories looks at a present day incident with one of the Tracy boys and then offers Lucy's perspective on an earlier incident that provided the precedent.  
> i hope you enjoy!
> 
> Thanks again to my partner in Tracy worship and wonderful beta, Soleil_Lumiere.

Geoff stood out in the paddock, head up, watching.

Lucy watched him in turn, from the big old kitchen in the Tracy family farmhouse, and voiced her not-so secret worry. 

“Is it going to be that kind of storm?”

Behind her, Alan continued whining in the way that three year olds invented millennia ago in order to grind down their mothers’ resistance, a bleat of peculiarly penetrating power seemingly summoned at exactly the moment when Lucy’s equanimity was at its lowest ebb.

“I don’t wanna storm.”

“Ah, come on, Allie. Storms are cool.” Gordon looked up from where he was colouring with more enthusiasm than accuracy at the kitchen table. “Mom, do you know there can be storms with fish in them?”

“Pleased to hear it.”

“I don’t know,” muttered Ruth, coming to stand by Lucy at the window. Ruth, Kansas born and bred, laid claim to the Kansan weather sense that detected tornadoes in thunderous skies in a way that east coast city-born Lucy could only envy. “The weather channel’s saying it’s likely. Got alerts out for the whole county. I’ll be glad when those boys are home.”

“It’s not nice for the fish, Mom. They get splattered.”

“Then I’m not pleased to hear it. I think I should bring Geoff in now then, don’t you?”

“Probably be for the best.” Ruth gave an involuntary shiver, and even more than the lowering sky and nagging sense of wrongness that kept Lucy glancing outside, it was Ruth’s obvious disquiet that had her spooked.

That, and the efforts of Tracy Number Six, currently turning slowly and creating his or her own little whirlpool of nausea in her belly.

The kitchen felt stuffy, the day long and tiresome and somehow increasingly ominous, a kind of deep-seated, building fear that resisted reason and kept her wishing for all her boys to be here beside her.

Silly, really, to have her essential calmness disturbed so much by a fluctuation in the weather, but Lucy feared tornadoes. The Tracys had the best shelter money could buy and Jeff’s team of engineers could devise, prepared and stocked to withstand the Zombie apocalypse cheerfully predicted by Scott as a dramatic six year old, so many years ago now. The weather warning systems were significantly more accurate than they were even in her own youth, and the efforts towards climate control meant that the truly devastating seasons of thirty years ago just didn’t happen anymore. Still. People (children, her children) could be caught away from shelter. People (her husband) could be caught in the sky. It still happened. And there was something about the notion of it, the thought of being whisked away into shredding nothingness, that terrified her city soul.

“Alright. Boys, behave.”

Gordon nodded, perfectly cheerful in the darkening kitchen. His tongue stuck out between his teeth as he obliterated what seemed to be a drawing of a firefighter in a flurry of haphazard red. The automatic light hadn’t yet come on, so Lucy reached over to manually flick the switch. Immediate warm orange glow made her feel marginally better, made the kitchen look homey and comforting again.

“Do you think we’ll have a tsunami?”

Alan detected the kind of ghoulish delight that prompted the question, a bizarre boy trait that her Gordon seemed to have developed to a gift. The whine shifted a notch higher.

“Don’t wanna soo-nummy. What’s a soo-nummy?”

“No, we won’t have a tsunami.” She gave Gordon a glare that, as usual, he remained utterly impervious to. “You need an ocean to have a tsunami. Kansas is in the middle of the United States. No ocean.”

“Could be a big one. Biggest one ever. Could be a comet one. Could be a hundred feet high.”

“In which case I’d get out surfboards and we’d ride to California.” 

That idea lit up Gordon like a paying poker machine. “Awesome!”

“Good, well, keep your brother occupied. I’ll just be outside for a bit.”

Alan wailed. “Don’t wanna be octopus.”

It wasn’t really his fault. Her poor little man was coming off a week long bout of tonsillitis, and his eyes looked too big in a face too pale for her liking. Lucy sighed.

“Come here,” she said, taking a seat at the table, and Alan wriggled onto her lap, snuggling against the swelling that six months of growth had produced in her body. Alan, just as Gordon and each of his brothers before him had experienced in turn, was fascinated by the weird thing inside Mom. “Now, sweetheart, what will we make for your brothers’ supper? Hmm?”

Her youngest turned his head into her shoulder, hiding his face from a world she knew was just a little too much for him today. She could empathise. The thought came to her of burying her own head in someone’s shoulder, and the pang of loneliness and need that claimed her almost at once did nothing to make her cope with the day any better. Ruth came over to pat her shoulder.

“I could make a quiche or two?”

She’d become expert at hiding the winces that Ruth’s cooking evoked.

“Oh, that’s kind of you, but the boys have football training tomorrow night, need something solid. I’ve got chuck steak thawing, thought I’d cook up some Irish stew.”

“Huh. Alright. I know when my culinary talents are unwanted.” But she said it with a smile hidden in her voice, and once again, Lucy thanked whatever fate gave her this strong and sweet woman for a mother in law and friend.

“Don’t wanna stew.”

“Hey, Allie, you know what they put in stew?”

A warning. “Gordon…”

“They chop up trolls and carrots. Chop, chop, chop. Every little bit of them. Even their noses. Chop, chop, chop.”

Alan’s head came up from her shoulder. Her rebuke of Gordon died as she saw the way Alan’s eyes suddenly sparkled.

“Do they?” He turned to his mother. “Do they, Mommy?”

“Do they what?”

“Put trolls in stew?”

“I imagine it depends on the butcher.”

“Do we have trolls in our stew?”

She glanced at Gordon, and caught the tiniest of nods. He was reassuring her, guiding her. Sometimes, such moments of adulthood in her sons could catch at her heart, make her want to clutch them tight in their boyhood and keep them forever hers, and safe. Sometimes, the glimpses of the men they would become made her reel. Sometimes, she was just infinitely grateful, and she returned the nod.

“Oh, yes. Your daddy loves troll stew.”

A giggle, and Alan’s mood shifted again.

“Did Daddy chop them up?”

“No, I did.” Ruth grabbed the old cleaver that hung above the dresser and advanced on Alan, waving it. “Chopped them up, one by one. And they roared and they yelled, but I didn’t stop chopping.”

Now the giggle was a shriek, but a happy one. Lucy looked across the table to catch Gordon’s eye, but he was already ahead of her.

“Come on, Al. Let’s go get some trolls.” Gordon reached out, and Alan took his hand before clambering down, too big now for his brother to lift him as he’d once done. He managed to elbow Lucy in the gut as he did.

“Thanks, Al,” she muttered, but the boys were stomping away to the hall and the stairs, and she was left to give Ruth a twisted grin.

“Trolls. Last week he was terrified of them.”

“Now he wants to eat them. History of the human race, right there.”

She heard Gordon singing in an off-key voice, something about going on a troll hunt, and Alan’s uncertain piping coming along, as he did, a few steps behind.

It was marvellous to her, that her two youngest boys got on so well. In her own family of four girls, her next youngest wanted nothing to do with the baby of the family. An age gap of three years meant that her sister India was beginning school while her youngest sister Callie was still mastering speech, and India entirely associated herself with Lucy and the eldest, Charlotte, always in a hurry to grow up and catch the others. Any effort to lump the two youngest together was met with violent protest, and it was Lucy herself who more often than not looked out for little Callie.

Whereas Gordon had been fascinated by Alan from the moment he was born. The biggest problem was stopping him co-opting a non-verbal toddler into efforts at climbing roofs and trees or swimming across ponds. On his first day at pre-school he rushed home to set up a blackboard and instruct Alan in everything he’d learned that day, knowing their storybooks well enough that he could pretend he was reading them, proudly drawing a wobbly A and informing his little brother that that was his name, just as Gndo was his.

She smiled, fondly, then stood and stretched.

“Alright. Better go get Geoff.”

Ruth nodded, drawn once more to the dramatic sky. “And Virgil’s cages. I hate to think what that boy would say if his critters got blown away.”

Lucy hummed agreement, then grabbed her old coat from the back of the kitchen door and headed outside. 

The wind was coming in sudden, disconcerting gusts. The barn door stood open, from when her father in law Grant had taken the tractor out in the morning. He wouldn’t be back until after dark, and for all that he could be grumpy and occasionally downright irascible, there was a solidity and unwavering loyalty to him that she could do with today. He was another she’d be glad to see safely under the family roof.

She couldn’t hope for Jeff. He’d been much better at working from home these last few years, or at least within an easy commute in Kansas City, but this week he was unavoidably away. Somewhere in Europe. For a woman like Lucy, used to loving a travelling life before marriage and children, hearing the details of her husband’s adventures in Milan or Prague or London didn’t exactly thrill her - Jeff had learned to keep details of food eaten and sights seen to himself. Today, she’d put up even with the irritation that vicarious jet-setting brought her if it meant he was home.

His namesake was at the furthest corner of the field. Of course. Geoff the Clydesdale was a refugee from a farm sale nearby, one Lucy didn’t have the heart to turn away, and one beloved of her boys. They could all fit on his back, even now; Alan on his withers, John holding carefully to him, Scott next, Gordon wedged between Scott and a Virgil who had clear instructions to keep a firm hold on child number four. A photo of the Tracy boys on horseback hung over the fireplace in the living room, and it made Lucy smile every time she looked at it.

Geoff was patient and kind and today she wished for half his quiet strength.

Her efforts at renaming the big old horse were met with consternation and downright refusal. For all Virgil’s insistence that “It’s his name, he’d get confused,” and John’s declaration that they’d promised him a home and therefore couldn’t retrospectively insert clauses and conditions about his identity, and Gordon’s bizarre theory on mummy horses naming baby horses, she suspected it was all simply so that her boys could hop up on his broad back and yell, “Giddy-up, Geoff!”, or “Whoa, Geoff!” or, in Gordon’s case, “You’ve got a big, fat belly, Geoff.”

Ah, well. A little harmless subversion never hurt. 

She trudged across the field, the long spring grass catching at her legs, her voice lost against the wind blowing straight at her and whipping her hair back and across her face, Alice band be damned. Ordinarily at the sight of a human marching towards him Geoff turned and began ambling to meet them, but today he watched her as if he’d never seen any such creature before, and as she got nearer he tossed his large head up and down, expressing surprise at her existence.

“I just want you up in the barn, Geoff. Out of this weather. Come on, big fella, how about it?”

In answer he swung away and trotted past her, neck arched, legs high, forgetting he was a sedate seventeen year old in the excitement of a windy day.

“Oh, no, Geoff, don’t be perverse. Not today.”

Well, if he was heading past her he was heading towards the barn, so she waved her arms and slogged back the way she came, praying this was a once-around-the-paddock deal.   
Of course, it wasn’t. For an animal who usually displayed such good sense, Geoff had obviously decided that he didn’t like or trust anything today – not Lucy, not the sky, and not the sight of the open barn door ahead of him, with all its attendant comfort. He wheeled and snorted and finally Lucy simply stood and watched him clomp past her, again, as frustrated and tired and ready to burst into ridiculous tears as she’d ever felt in her life.

A banging by the barn caught both her and Geoff’s attention, and with a satisfied whicker he barrelled past her to where Lucy saw Ruth bashing the feed bucket against the barn door.

That she had missed this obvious and time-honoured trick just added to her misery.

“Get inside,” Ruth called to her, faint in the wind. “I’ll get him.”

Lucy shook her head. “I’ll get the boy’s critters.”

Ruth waved her agreement and Lucy headed around back of the barn to where an assortment of hand built cages sat snugly against the wall. First John and Virgil, and now John, Virgil and Gordon populated them with animals in need of care, found by the roadside or in their excursions through the small woods down by the old mill pond. Today there were only two occupants; a box turtle with a broken shell now mended with duct tape, and a baby raccoon, found beside its dead mother in the tumbledown mill itself. Lucy lifted each cage in turn to bring it into the shelter of the barn, finishing just as Ruth closed the loose box door on Geoff, who was still too agitated to settle with the treat of oats with which Ruth had lured him. Together, she and Ruth wrestled the barn door closed, sliding it home even as the wind banged it in its track.

“I don’t like this.” Ruth stood with her hand up shielding her face, squinting into the wind as she studied the sky. “You see that? That kind of green look, over the Kennedy’s way? That’s not good.”

“Should we call Grant to come home?”

“No.” Ruth linked her arm through Lucy’s and took her back towards the sole patch of warm light emanating from the kitchen window. “Grant’s closer to McCready’s, he’ll stop there if he thinks the sky and the warnings warrant it.”

Lucy looked over her shoulder once more at the massive clouds hanging above them. In the wide, flat landscape their own little farmhouse and the cluster of trees about it seemed an impertinence about to be struck away by the green-grey swirls that filled her vision. She bent her head and hurried alongside Ruth.

She wanted her boys.

Inside, the sound of the approaching storm was less loud but somehow more eerie, whistles and moans born of old wood and metal meeting fresh force.

“I’ll put the kettle on.” Ruth steered her to a seat before grabbing mugs and milk. “Hot tea and feet up. That’s what you need.”

“No,” Lucy answered, honestly. “What I need is my boys all safe and home. Will they keep them at school, do you think? If there is – if the weather looks like getting worse?"

She couldn’t even say the word.

“Honey, Kansans have been living with tornadoes forever. Corinna at the middle school has a good head on her shoulders, she’ll make the right call. That school will be tracking the weather to the second, those buses won’t be leaving unless they get the all clear.” Ruth set the square container still called a kettle to boil, an almost instant process in the fusion unit. “I remember one time Jeff got stuck at school in the shelter and some of the parents were on the comms demanding their kids be sent home to get chores done. Just a storm, they said, and this was November, not tornado weather, but Corinne Klovesky knew better, she kept those kids back and sure enough, a twister came through and took out half a dozen houses down the Oskaloosa Road way.”

It was meant to be comforting, Lucy knew, but the thought of children that close to obliteration through ignorance sent another twist into her belly.

“I’ll go check on those two,” she said. “I’ll get my cup of tea when I make sure they’re fine.”

Ruth just nodded, a sympathetic shrewdness in her look. But before Lucy could head out for the staircase, a call came from somewhere on it.

“Lucy, could you join me for a minute?”

It was Jeff, precise to the intonation and wording if not the pitch, and Lucy gasped.

“The little monkey. Gordon! Come here if you want to talk to me.”

In her peripheral vision she saw Ruth was stifling giggles, so no help there. Gordon eventually appeared in the entrance to the kitchen, an air of injured innocence that made Lucy groan. Injured innocence on Gordon was always a giveaway of trouble poorly hidden and imminently revealed. She could do without it today.

“Two things. You do not call for me like that. And where is Alan?”

“But Lucy’s your name.” The term ‘barrack-room lawyer’ was invented for Gordon.

“Yes. And I don’t mind you calling me Lucy. But there are only five people in the world who can call me ‘Mom’, and I love that you’re one of them.”

Score one for Lucy – that worked. She could almost see the wheels of flattery working with his own inherent kindness to create an instant shift of opinion. 

The blatant mimicry of his father she’d leave for another day.

“Now, where’s Alan?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you looked for him?”

“Yes!” indignant. As if this wasn’t the same boy who asked his mother only this morning where his shoes were after declaring he’d searched ‘everywhere and God’s elbow’ – his grandfather’s saying, shorn of expletive – only for her to find them in seconds, a bare yard from where they were meant to be.

“Did you look with boys’ eyes?”

A twisted mouth met that one.

“Uh-huh. Maybe go and have another look, but this time with your best eyes, okay?”

“Your mother needs a rest. Scoot.” Ruth had seen too many little boys with aggravation on their minds to be patient with this one.

Gordon left, glowering. As he did the farmhouse was suddenly rocked with the blattering sound of hail striking its roof, its windows.

“Oh my!” Ruth said, turning to look outside once more. A muffled shriek announced Gordon’s hasty return, as he grabbed the first legs available to him and almost toppled her over in the process.

“Sakes, boy, it’s just hail.” She reached one hand down to ruffle his thick, blond hair. “Just noisy bits of ice, that’s all.”

“It sounds real,” Gordon said, into her thigh, and that shook a laugh from Ruth. But Lucy was standing up, her head lifted, listening past the drumming.

She needed her baby.

“Where did you last see Alan?”

Gordon turned his head sideways, obviously reluctant to leave his grandmother’s shelter and the gentle petting of his hair.

“We were in Scott’s room.”

“Gordon, how many times have you been told not to – oh, never mind.” Scott was of an age when hand-scrawled signs of ‘Keep Out!’ featured heavily in his decorating choices, and Lucy was beginning to support him in his need for occasional privacy now that it had moved beyond territorial posturing. “Why did you split up?”

“Hidey?”

Ah. The question mark of doom. Lucy unclenched her jaw and fought for patience.

“What kind of hidey?”

A slow blink as Gordon calculated the depths of his iniquity, and then a sigh as essential honesty indicated he was too deep for equivocation.

“Hide from the storm monsters?”

“I see. Your invention I take it? And what do these storm monsters do?”

“Stormy things? Alan was scared that… ”

“Alan was scared what?”

Gordon turned his head back to the safety of Grandma’s legs.

The hand in his hair stopped stroking, gripped gently but firmly and lifted his head so that his face was up towards the two women who loved him unquenchably but who also knew a guilty conscience when they saw one.

“Gordon, I need to find Alan. You’re his big brother, you should be looking after him.”

“I was! I was telling him stories.”

“About storm monsters?”

“It didn’t start about them.” Gordon’s big brown eyes, so like her own, widened even further to convince her of his sincerity. “But Alan kept asking about why you went outside, so I told him you were fighting the storm monsters and you would keep us safe.”

Lucy closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Right. I’ll go and find him, you stay here and help Grandma. And next time, think!”

As parental injunctions went, it was lame, but she had nothing better to offer. She exchanged a long-suffering look with Ruth, ignored the cowardly little spike of reluctance that hated leaving the warm, bright kitchen, and headed upstairs, calling Alan’s name as she did so.

Scott’s room was empty, as she expected. So was John’s and Virgil’s, next door, and Gordon’s and Alan’s. The noise from the hail was even louder up here, and she matched it with her voice. The bedroom she shared with Jeff was next, checking under beds and in cupboards, racking her memory for every special place that might attract her little space boy. Was it Alan or Virgil who liked getting behind the big old armchair in the library downstairs? Which of them always chose the bath to hide in when playing hide-and-seek? Which one crawled up into the airing cupboard in the laundry? So many wet or snowy Kansan days, so many boys’ feet rumbling up and down the stairs, shouting and laughing and crying and shrieking. 

Now it felt as though she was alone, looking for her baby as the nightmarish sky growled at her, flung ice and wind and thunder at her, as prematurely darkened rooms transformed into some place alien and unwelcoming. Her feeling of wrongness grew, the sense of catastrophe lurching toward her.

Her boys. Her boys. She wanted them home.

“Alan! Sweetheart, where are you?” She bent to peer under an old bureau on the upstairs landing. “Mommy’s here, baby boy. Alan?”

And now lightning lit up the landing, dramatic and sudden, accompanied almost at once by a bang of thunder so loud it shook the house.

Ruth called from the kitchen.

“Lucy? You alright?”

“I can’t find him!” It was imperative now, there was danger here in this dark house, alone on the great flatland of Kansas. 

Her mother-in-law appeared in the doorway below, her face obscured by the light behind her.

“I’ll look down here, honey. He can’t be far. He’s got to be in the house.”

Until Ruth said it, she hadn’t even thought of her baby going outside into this malevolent weather.

“Of course – of course he does.” She caught the catch in her voice, upbraided herself for it. Her other son was sitting alone in the kitchen. He didn’t need to hear fear in his mother.

“Gordon, stay put.”

He came to stand where Ruth had just left. 

“I can help look.”

“No thanks, Grody. Just stay put. That would be a big help.”

“Okay, Mom.” Like Ruth, his face was hidden by the brighter illumination behind him, but the worry in his voice didn’t need any facial expression to be clear. “I didn’t mean to scare him. I don’t want him to be scared.”

“I know. I know. Just stay there where I know you’re safe, okay?”

The wrong thing to say, she knew it even as the words left her mouth, because Gordon was often unsubtle and frequently reckless, but he loved his brothers with equal abandon. His tone went up an octave.

“Alan’s safe!”

“We’re all safe.” Ruth’s no-nonsense voice came from the library. “You’d think there’d never been a storm here before. Get back in the kitchen, young man. Your mother’s got hormones as an excuse, you’ve got nothing.”

“What’s hormones?”

“I’ll tell you later. Go get yourself a pop from the ice-box and finish your colouring.” 

Gordon disappeared back into the kitchen. Five minutes later Ruth came out to the hallway to look up at Lucy.

“Well, he’s not down here, as far as I can see.”

“He must be. He’s got to be in here somewhere.” Lucy jumped as another lightning strike sounded nearby.

“Basement?”

“Can you? I’ll check the attic. He shouldn’t be able to get in either…” She left the shrug earned by any mother of five boys who knows very well that ‘shouldn’t be able to’ is as unstable a proposition in parenting as any quantum physics theory.

Climbing up to the attic trapdoor meant climbing towards the storm. When she released the trapdoor the immediate increase in noise made it seem like she was under the heart of it, with the hail hammering onto the old tiles and the windows vibrating in their casements. The thought of her little one up here caused her to scramble upwards as fast as she could, pulling herself up to stand amongst old chests and boxes full of long-abandoned books and toys and sports equipment.

“Alan, baby? Alan, are you up here? Answer me, sweetheart. It’s Mommy.”

But even as she half-heartedly pulled aside old clothes and broken furniture she knew he wasn’t up there. The attic felt empty and hollow, a fragile shell to protect the family below.

“Oh, where are you?” She made her way through the clutter to bend and peer through one of the shaking windows, gripping the casement as if to hold the house together, two frail hands willing strength into its timbers. Much closer now was the grey mass that had so alarmed Ruth, a giant swirl of ragged cloud that swallowed up the sky leaving a thin strip of brighter, greenish light at the horizon. It was horrible, a thing of menace, and she cast a quick look through the streaming window towards the road, hoping to see it empty, to know that her three school aged children were being kept in the secure confines of the elementary and middle school shared auditorium.

It was only chance that led her gaze to stray as far as it could around the southern end of the house towards the rain-battered barn. A sudden impulse to double check the barn door was closed, perhaps, or maybe a flash of red against the hail-whitened yard that registered to her eyes before her brain.

She gasped and then cried out. Even as she did she saw another little blob of colour, this time green, rush across the white to join the red.

Frantically she pulled at the windows, missing the latch twice before lifting it and then finding nothing but wood swollen into tight resistance. The windows wouldn’t budge, and she screamed her futility and terror at them before turning and throwing herself across the junk strewn attic floor, down the ladder, down the staircase, saving her breath now for the fight ahead.

“Lucy! What on earth – “

But Ruth was ignored, brushed aside as she plunged out into the wildness to where her two little boys were huddled on the ground, beaten down by the storm above them.  
It was only as she got to within mere feet of them that she could hear Alan’s screaming over the shrieking wind.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!”

Gordon she now saw was not huddled but bent over his brother, trying vainly to lift him, calling his name in a pitiful urging to help him help them both. Alan was almost rigid with fear, too big to be lifted but too little to stand against the wind that had her doubled over in order to fight her way through it.

She reached them both, grabbed Gordon’s arm and shook him to get his attention.

“Inside!” she yelled, and with one quick last look at his brother, Gordon staggered a few steps before the wind blew him sideways and he hurried back to grip at her jeans belt. Lucy reached behind her, briefly, to pull him in tight against her before bending lower to lift Alan, still screaming, up into her arms. His face was icy against hers.

One hand back to gather Gordon to her side and then she yelled, “Come on, run!”

Awkwardly the three of them scrambled back across the crunching ice of the yard, pieces of the maple tree by the barn snapping into her face, hail hitting and sticking into her hair, the pain of it disregarded. She looked up to see Ruth standing at the back door, gesturing to them, and she lowered her head and ran for shelter.

They tumbled into the warmth of the kitchen together, Gordon sobbing, Alan screaming, Lucy panting and gabbling at Alan, nonsense words of calm and love and over now, all over now.

“Good grief.” Ruth took one moment to do the quickest of triages, then nodded decisively. “Gordon, stop that noise. Come with me to get towels and blankets for your mother and Alan.”

It was almost comical, the way Gordon’s tears stopped in mid-howl. He blinked first at Grandma, then at his mother, then released his grip on her belt to follow Ruth out to the hall and ultimately the downstairs bathroom – but not before sending one last checking glance at Lucy and Alan, now sitting at the table, Alan’s head buried once again in Mommy’s shoulder.

“Shhh, baby boy, shhh. Oh my goodness, what were you doing out there, my heart? Why were you out in the storm, baby?”

“You got losted,” Alan sobbed. “You got losted.”

“No I didn’t, sweetheart. I was always here.”

“You got losted.”

“I’m right here,” Lucy said again, lowering her voice to a croon now that her own heartrate had come back from its frantic pace. “Look, Alan. Look, we’re back in the kitchen, and I’ve got you, Mommy’s got you.”

Alan pulled back and his tiny hands, white with cold, gripped each side of her face. She winced, but held still as he stared, naked in his distress, into her eyes.

“Mommy,” he said, telling her something, but she didn’t understand, couldn’t translate what a three year old vocabulary and an overwhelming existential terror were trying to convey to her. She could only stare back, all her love for her little boy there for him to read if her own words weren’t enough.

“I’m too little.”

“Too little?”

“The storm’s too big and I’m too little.” As if to underline the disparity in power another gust shook the house, sending rumbles up through the floorboards, rattling the walls.

“That’s why we stay inside, little man,” Lucy said, one hand wiping his wet forehead where a small bruise was beginning to form.

“But you didn’t! You went outside and the storm monsters were getting you.”

“No, honey, I was outside to put Geoff in his house, all nice and snug and safe like we are. And I put the turtle in the barn and the baby raccoon in the barn.”

“Ralph,” said Gordon, coming back with two towels. His own hair was sticking up in crazy spikes, the obvious result of Ruth’s vigorous efforts. He handed one towel to Lucy.

“Ralph?”

“Ralph is the raccoon. It’s a good name because it’s got a capital R in it.”

“Hmmm.” Lucy took the towel and began gently drying Alan’s hair, now darkened with rainwater and flat against his head, its soft yellow lost. His hands had left her face and were now tight against his own chest, trapped against hers. “So what’s the turtle’s name? Tony? Tilly? Terrence?”

Gordon looked at her as if she had two heads instead of one aching one.

“Eric.”

“Of course. You did tell me. There, that’s better, Alan. Is Grandma getting blankets, Gordon?”

“Yeah. One for me and Ally, and the big patch one for you.”

“That sounds nice.”

Gordon nodded. Already, she could tell, the fear in the storm was fading for Gordon. Her little cork-boy, popping back to the surface, resilient to a fault. But ready to run out into a maelstrom for his little brother, don’t forget, she told herself.

“Gordon, I told you to stay in the kitchen, didn’t I?”

“But Moooom…”

She draped the towel around Alan’s shivering little shoulders and spared one hand to lift a warning finger.

“No buts. You need to do as you’re told, Gordon. It wasn’t safe outside.”

“But Alan was outside and I saw him and – “

“What was the smart thing?”

Now he was looking at the floor, abashed, and it broke her heart a little to see his bravery curbed like this. But she knew it was what Jeff would do, and she knew why. Of all her boys, Gordon was the one most likely to overdo anything or everything at any given time. For a brief second, and with frightening clarity, she saw teenage Gordon hurtling across the water at terrifying speed, and it brought a sharpness she didn’t feel to her voice.

“Gordon?”

“Find you?”

“Exactly. Now off you go, get out of those wet clothes.”

“S’Alan coming?”

“I’ll bring him along in a sec. Off you go.”

With a heartfelt sigh Gordon turned and headed off for the bathroom.

“Now. Let’s look at you. There. All better.”

But Alan shook his head.

“You promise, Mommy.”

“Promise what, sweetheart?"

“You promise.”

“I need to know what you want me to promise. It’s not good to promise if you don’t know what it is.”

Alan looked at her, his child’s face solemn. 

“I’m too little for storm monsters. You need to wait till I’m big.”

For a moment she thought him satisfied, but when she checked again, the shadow in her littlest son’s eyes was still there. As the youngest of five Alan was sometimes lost to her among the mayhem that his brothers brought, a sweet and needy bundle who tagged along and tugged at her heart but who had yet to fully define himself in the way his brothers had. Now, here, was a moment of just such definition. She understood, in the way such insights would suddenly make themselves known, that this was her child; ready to take on the forces of the world if he needed to for his family’s sake, but achingly aware of the limitations age and size inflicted upon him in a way that older children were spared. He would not compare himself to adults, knowing that they were other creatures and not really to be aspired to as a child. No, he would always have children as his yardstick, but children bigger and faster and smarter than he. Like him but always ahead of him, a Sisyphean torment.

She knew this in the same way she knew that Scott was an ordinary boy who wanted to save the world, one problem at a time, with an idealism that was anything but ordinary; that John needed order and love in his world, and was always confounded and distressed by cruelty; that Virgil would always watch and worry but was the most genuinely realized of all her children; that Gordon’s wildness might take him to extremes but that kindness, in himself and others, was always his true north.

Did she bring this to her little Alan? This fear? This need to protect beyond his capacity? Was it her weakness, on this stormy day, which prompted a three year old child to face the elements in order to save her?

There would always be storm monsters in Alan’s life. With brothers like his, with a father intent on shaping the world to his own demands, however altruistic, there would always be challenges earned and unearned for him to face. How could she make such a promise?

“Sweetheart, do you know what trust is?”

Alan shook his head, slowly, one tuft of newly dried hair rising like a fluffy banner on his head.

“It’s when you know that the people who love you will always be there for you and look after you. Daddy will be here, I’ll be here, Scotty will be here, Grandma and Grandpa and John and Virgil and Gordon will be here to look after you.”

“You’ll be here, Mommy.”

“Yes, darling, of course I’ll be here. That’s what trust is, knowing that everything will be alright in the end.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. But her baby boy needed it, and maybe the lie would help him to grow strong, maybe it would soothe those childhood fears when they grew too big for him.

For now, he sighed, and leant forward into her arms again, pressing against her belly, causing Tracy Number Six to kick back in annoyance.

“Too many monsters, Mommy.”

“Maybe. But lots of Tracys too, Ally. Remember that.”

He made another little sound, something like a question, and she shushed him, quietly, as the sky tore itself into shreds above them, as the light held true, and the little island in the middle of the wheat fields stood strong against all the storm monsters in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know there's not a sixth Tracy. That's coming up in the next installment of this series, Virgil's.


End file.
